The Modern Octopus

Torchlight – Runic Games

Addiction is not a pretty thing – it’s life-consuming, it’s a burden and a distraction when you’re away from it. It keeps you awake at night either doing it or thinking about it. What’s even worse is when I have trouble explaining why I’m even addicted to it in the first place. Torchlight is one such addiction where I became hooked on what essentially seems to consist of clicking on stuff to see if anything good comes out. Sounds great huh? I’ve managed to kick the habit now, but I was main-lining that dirty stuff for quite some time. What was it that I was addicted to? Simple: loot. Why was I addicted to it? …not so simple.

The plot is almost non-existent and intentionally so as the designers didn’t want it to distract from the gameplay. I had little to no idea why I was in the dungeons and what quest I was actually doing, I was only aware that there was loot at the end of the quest. The game itself has extremely simple controls (though they gradually ramp up) that are basically just left-clicking on things. You don’t even control your movement directly, you just click where you want to go, click what you want to attack, click what you want to pick up and click what you want to sell. These almost childishly simple controls, a placeholder plot and a statistical barrage from the loot transpire to send you into a powerful loot-trance which can last for hours at a time.

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Portal & such like

What with games being so expensive we really need to get our money’s worth out of the pesky things! However, it’s becoming apparent to me that gamers seem distractedly preoccupied with quantity over quality, and that this fixation is somewhat divorced from considerations of price. Even if the ticket price is small, games are still not free from accusations of inadequate content. Much of the commentary surrounding 2007’s Portal was about how short it was, a finger that was also pointed at the recently released Braid (Portal came as part of the astonishingly cheap five-game Orange Box and Braid sold for £10). The low price of these games was apparently not justification enough for their brevity, and though many did recognise and appreciate the quality enough to feel that it made up the shortfall, some clearly still remained unsatisfied. Personally, I wondered whether the length of these cheaper games was even worth mentioning at all let alone justifying with reasons other than price – it seemed obvious to me they’d be short because they didn’t cost much, but clearly some people expected more. So is there some arbitrary quantity of game, regardless of cost, that must be provided? And is price only relevant to the quality alone?

At the other end of the spectrum from Portal and Braid, huge games like Fallout 3 get much praise for their sheer volume of content at normal retail price, so we are at least consistent if nothing else. Maybe it’s me that’s got it backwards, thinking of the price first then equating a length to it, rather than primarily thinking about how long I want a game to be then judging if it’s worth the price. However, an arbitrary expectation of length can have negative effects, and the story or gameplay can be dragged out to meet it. Some games simply don’t have the creative depth to fill that content requirement, and I’d much rather they just remove the filler and make is shorter. It might sound like a bit much to ask, but I’d like to see games being consistently good all the way through, even if that means being shorter than expected. It’s better to be left wanting more than it is to not make it all the way through.

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Understand Comics – Scott McCloud

Recently on Robert Ashley’s thoroughly marvelous A Life Well Wasted podcast, he mentioned Roger Ebert’s notion that games could not be considered a (high) art form as they don’t have sufficient authorial control. Varying levels of choice are inherent in games, one could theoretically go so far as to play Super Mario Bros. just by jumping up and down over and over again in one place, totally within the bounds of game’s rule-set. Of course they would not be playing ‘properly’ and as intended, but who’s to say they can’t do that? While gaming probably does have less control than other mediums, I found the discussion (and in fact most discussions about this subject) omitted the glaringly obvious fact that books, film and art also need to be consumed ‘properly’.

Take a book. Some people will scan the last page of a book before beginning reading, almost like a superstition, and in fact there’s nothing stopping them reading any page they like and in any order. Though it might sound absurd, this type of behavior is becoming more and more common; when surfing the internet we jump from hyperlink to hyperlink, mid-text and mid-video, consuming only bite-sized, non-sequential chunks of each. A film is in a similar quandary in terms of linear continuity, but also the viewing environment is way outside its control, yet still very important. Why should we create a proper environment on the creator’s behalf for ourselves to consume films in? So we can consume it properly and fully, to allow ourselves enjoy it. What if you only saw a painting out of the corner of your eye, what would you do? You’d go over to get a ‘proper’ look at it of course. My point is that we acknowledge expected ways to consume all these media in which the receiver has to play their part too, so why are games any different? Reading random pages or only watching half the film with the sound off might seem ridiculous or facetious, but no more so than just jumping up and down in the corner in Mario.

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